14 DAY TRIAL // Today brings us a new unveiling from the AMD garden, with the chip manufacturer rolling out the FirePro W8100 professional graphics card, destined to cater to the needs of CAD engineers and creative professionals working with demanding media files.
The new FirePro W8100 will challenge NVIDIA’s Quadro K5000 and takes advantage of 4 Teraflops of single precision and 2 Teraflops of double precision compute performance.
Of course, AMD says it will handle basically anything you throw at it, but that remains to be seen. The new graphic cards will be offered with 8GB of GDDR5 memory, 320GB/s bandwidth and support for Open CL 4.3.
On top of that, each card is capable of playing nice with four 4K display at 30GHz and or three 4K displays at 60GHz.
One single W8100 card is recommended when it comes to tasks involving digital content creation or the use of high-end CAM and CAD apps.
As for more demanding workflows including video editing and post-production refining, two cards should be used. Last but not least, for anything 4K-related four cards will be required.
Dell will be one of the first device manufacturers to be jumping onboard with the AMD FirePro professional graphics lineup by implementing them with their Dell Precision workstations. HP is also one of the early adopters when it comes to the new graphic cards.
This announcement comes after 3 months since AMD officially rolled out their new flagship professional cards, the FirePro W9100. The lower tier W8100 is based on AMD’s Hawaii GPU architecture and is being marketed by the company as a “high-volume specialist card” for advanced graphic users.
With the FirePro W8100, AMD is looking to mostly boots productivity for professionals spending countless hours in front of their working station while on a deadline.
AMD was also kind enough to show some benchmark results, which apparently prove the FirePro W8100 will be five times faster than its Arch competitor the NVIDIA K5000.
This result was achieved using the LuxMark v2.0 OpenCL test, while in SiSoftware Sandra the results were even more spectacular, with the FirePro’s performance being shown to be 38 times faster.
However, it should be highlighted that the NVIDIA K500 card, which AMD is comparing these results to, is a 2012 affair.
The new cards will become available on the market starting mid-July with a suggested price set at $2,499 / €1,840, similar to the rates touted by the competition.